Customer Reviews

Goddess of the Sea

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Christine Canady "CC" is an Air Force Sergeant, who is about to be sent on a 6-month tour of duty to the Middle East. It is the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday and even her only living relatives, mom and dad, have forgotten the day. So feeling a bit sorry for herself she celebrates alone consuming a couple bottles of champagne which culminated in a bit of a silly, or so she thought, dance on her balcony to the earth goddess and wishing for a bit of `magic' in her life!

Soon, she found herself on a C-130 trying to forget how much she hated flying, especially over water...when naturally, the military plane goes down. Harrowing as the crash is, it is even worse as she feels herself being dragged down and knowing she is about to die. But opening her eyes, she discovers herself looking into the face of a most beautiful mermaid and finds she is not only still alive but breathing under water as well. After a brief explanation and agreeing to the mermaid's wishes to become human, she finds her soul switched over into the voluptuous mermaid Undine and discovering that the year and location is 1014 in the waters surrounding ancient Wales. Furthermore, all is not magical, when she finds herself being pursued and almost raped by the royal merman, Sarpedon.

Gaea, Goddess of the Earth, (Undine's birth mother) who was instrumental in granting CC this `magic' in her life, comes to her aid, and grants CC legs to return to land with the stipulation that she must return every third night to the sea, else she'd die - UNLESS - she could find a man to truly love her for herself. Whipping up a storm and a story to explain her presence on land, CC is rescued in the water (she's not a good swimmer as a human) by, Dylan, another handsome merman, and brought close to shore. Soon a handsome Knight in shining honor (no kidding) rides up and drags her the rest of the way to land. Before too long, CC is embroiled in medieval politics and danger as the evil Sarpedon begins to use his power to create havoc for CC on land, and she pines for the sensitive merman Dylan who would love her for `eternity'.

Every so often I like to try out new authors and switch over to different genres to refresh myself. Reading the summary of this book I expected an amusing funny tale. I was wrong. What I discovered was a really a sensitive and magically entertaining love story. I truly enjoyed this book and perhaps it is because - maybe, deep down, I do believe in magic that I will recommend this to all of you who want to capture the magic of a truly magical love story. This was a wonderfully entertaining and pleasant read. ---- Marilyn, Official Reviewer for www.historicromancewriters.com

Christine Canady "CC" was an Air Force Sergeant. Forgotten on her twenty-fifth birthday, even by her parents, she wished for a little magic in her life. Shortly afterward, her military plane crashed into the ocean. Near death, CC thought she was hallucinating when a beautiful mermaid appeared and offered to swap bodies with her.

CC awakened to find herself in the time of Ancient Wales, where magic could still be found, and CC quickly learned that she had a royal merman, Sarpedon, determined to wed her against her will. Gaea, Goddess of Earth (and Undine's mother), granted CC legs to go ashore, but she must return to the sea every third night or die.

With one crazy merman in the sea, another handsome merman in the sea, a Knight courting her on land, and a shady abbot who was always nearby, CC/Undine had troubles galore!

**** If you do not believe in magic, stay away from this novel. But for those of us who do believe, or want to be convinced that magic does exist, here is the novel for you! Written like a fairy tale for adults, this book is perfect to cuddle up with on long chilly nights or days you may be snowed in. It will whisk you away to a warm tropical island. Wonderful light reading.

Reviewed by Detra Fitch for Huntress Reviews.

As a caveat: I want to point out that this book came extreeeeemely highly recommended, and sometimes one is the hardest on the books for which the highest expectations are harbored. With that said, on to the review:

"Goddess of the Sea" was a big bundle of unfulfilled promise. Here's what I liked:

The Main Characters - CC was self-reliant and relatively clever. Dylan was sweet and charming. Usually, if the protags are in place, well-drawn, and likeable, I'm able to push through even clunky writing and derive some sort of enjoyment from the book.

...That's about it.

I found the rest of the book poorly plotted, poorly paced, and poorly anchored in its setting. It took place on a random island with a sketchily drawn monastery, a stereotypically beefy, sexist knight, and a scheming clergyman. All of the secondary characters (with the possible exception of Gaea) were flat, flat, flat and served as nothing but levers designed to thrust the heroine into the arms of her sexy merman.

The sudden attitude change of all of the women on the island was twee and cutesy and reeked of modern feminism with a hint of "Ancient Female Mysteries." (**Waggles fingers mystically**) Listen - I'm 100% a feminist, and my censure of the way this was handled in the book is certainly not a reflection of my feelings towards feminism at all. No, my objection is to the clumsy, ham-fisted way PC Cast handled it. How on earth do you go from, "OMG, you're evil because you want to take your shirt off when you bathe" to "Let's all get drunk together in your bedroom and talk about relationships?"

Additionally, CC - who's been sensible the entire length of the book - suddenly makes a series of terrible decisions that are so out of character it's laughable. She's one of only TWO characters that have been fleshed out! Why bother drawing her character so clearly if you are just going to chuck it all out the window in order to further the plot with a moronic device?

The "surprise twist" wasn't, and the ending was flabby and disjointed. In a book full of half-baked ideas and weird twists of logic, I shouldn't have been surprised by how the conclusion was equally flaccid and stupid.

When I completed the book, I felt as if I had been smacked across the face with a pair of dirty underpants... The experience was confusing, kind of gross, and completely inexplicable.

(As an aside - I found the penis slit for mermen hilarious. The anatomical issues presented by a merman and a human woman having sex were dealt with in a rather clinical fashion by the author, and it left me sniggering, prompting my husband to ask me what I was cackling about. How do you explain that???)

Some people found the humor to be lacking in this book. Well, I certainly found enough to laugh at. The magic ritual she uses that sets everything in motion? Hilarious. And I must admit this is the first romance novel I've read with [wancking] within the first few chapters and attempted incestuous fish rape as a plot device for keeping two lovers apart. I nearly put this book down when I realized that Cast was consistently misspelling "Sarge"! "Sarg" is not the accepted spelling of the informal address for a sergeant. I don't know how this slipped past her editor. And there's no explanation for how CC can understand the speech of eleventh-century Wales and how they understand her. The syntax and diction of CC's dialogue changes for the most part, but she gets away with more modern idioms than she deserves.

Ms. Cast introduced some interesting ideas that she just never came back to. As my friends and I discussed, the idea that after this goddess-summoning ritual she suddenly becomes this sexy creature that men are suddenly noticing? Much better premise for a book. Also, we got to see what happened to CC in Undine's body, but we never saw what happened to Undine while she was in CC's. There are so many themes about identity and beauty raised by the plot that Cast just never addresses.

The attraction between CC and a minor character, Sean, would have been a much better direction to take this book than where she ended up. Compared with Sean, Dylan is not a very good romance genre hero.

The attraction between the CC and Dylan was supposed to be as soulmates but all Cast showed was a superficial lust. We rarely ever saw anything from Dylan's POV, so it's kind of hard to believe that he truly loves CC for CC rather than conflating her with his childhood love of Undine whose form CC inhabits. CC is supposed to be a fairly inexperienced, sensible Air Force sergeant, yet it doesn't weird her out when Dylan professes his undying loyalty to her after they've hung out together for one night? I don't buy it. Of course, in general CC's military background seems to have no influence on her actions and character once she switches bodies with the mermaid, but occassionally Cast tries to tell us it does. Show, don't tell, Ms. Cast. I need to see it.

This book was fairly amusing as a mindless read, but if you're looking for characters with any degree of depth and consistency, look elsewhere.

I loved this book. It was a wonderful blend of romance and magic. I love the way Ms Cast describes the rich underwater scenery. She has a way of making you believe her story could happen. She lovingly adds a bit of pagan belief structure to her book to get the reader to understand that all women are beautiful, special and create their own wonderful magic. She speaks eloquently of the differences in us all that make us truly unique, and that we should embrace those differences. From the first page to the last, Ms. Cast keeps you spellbound and turning the page, eager to discover what happens next.

CC (Christine) Canaday's 25th birthday is not going well. Everyone seems to have forgotten her, parents included despite their claim not to have, and it's a lonely night with no TV and a bucket of KFC to celebrate. The next day, she will be on an airplane (which she is terrified of) on her way to a tour of duty in the Air Force.

Her fears seem justified when the plane goes down, killing the first man she has been attracted to and dumping her in the sea. All is not lost, a mermaid rescues her, and exchanges lives with her. Christine can not enjoy her new beauty and power for long; an evil merman appears, intent on incestously raping her. She is saved by friendly dolphins and her mother, Gaea. To keep her safe, she is placed in a land form and sent to a medeval monastery. The catch is she will have to return to the sea every three days, lest she die. In the monk's world, she pretends to be an amnesiac princess. The dangers are not past, though. Life there is unfriendly and a young knight serves as the tool of her enemy. Somehow, she manages to find allies and even love.

**** This sweet and funny romance will satisfy all of us who cried at the end of the original Little Mermaid. CC is a smart and funny heroine forced into choices and changes that are painful and difficult, but making the best of things still. ****

Goddess of the Sea has a very engaging herione as well as very well developed villains! The herione is capable, intelligent and witty. Ms. Cast's writing style is very appealing to those of us with a particular bent to sarcastic humor! The story has elements of romance, adventure, conflict and accurately portrays the difficulty of making life altering decisions.

I thought GODDESS OF THE SEA was fun. To summarize, it is the story of a 25-year old military girl named CC whose plane crashes in the ocean and whose life is saved by a mermaid. The catch? The mermaid and CC switch bodies, leaving CC to deal with a malicious, unwanted suitor whose evilness forces CC to seek the aid of a goddess. CC gets swept away (literally) into the past, where she is saved by a knight in shining armor, yet she pines for the love of a handsome merman.

GODDESS OF THE SEA is a unique and original romance, and CC is an enjoyable character who catches your attention. A story like this could have been overbearingly cheesy, but I feel the author succeeds in creating an alternative world revolving around the myth of the mermaid. One complaint I had is that there's a lot of redundancy in this book. In fact, the author appears to enjoy pounding you on the head with her messages that 1) women are great & have magic & need to stick together - girl-power and feminism just aren't my thing - and 2) the hero will wait for CC for an eternity (Okay, I got it the first time. It doesn't have to be repeated another 2,000 times). Ironically, while the author is overbearing with her themes and foreshadowing, she can be vague in other situations - for instance, the resolution with the abbot needed more explanation.

I also have to admit that I would have liked things with Sean to have turned out different...When the goddess kept asking CC if she was sure about being in love with the merman, my thoughts kept going back to Sean. Oh well.

Regardless, I would recommend GODDESS OF THE SEA as a light, entertaining read. While I wouldn't suggest reading it on an airplane (trust me), you may want to take it to the beach somewhere, in hopes of catching glimpse of a gorgeous merman of your own.

For those interested in mermaid romances, THE LAST MERMAID by Shana Abe is a beautiful, poetic novel about four different mermaids and their mortal lovers.

This is the first book of Cast's that I've read, and to say I was disappointed is an understatement. Instead of a developed strong female character, we got a ditz who talks to herself and "Mr. Phone", cries at the drop of a hat, regularly downs entire bottles of champagne by herself, and... Did Cast do *any* kind of research for this, or did she just pick some cool-sounding job out of a hat and tack it onto a pre-existing character?

So many things struck me as wrong. What intro to anthropology *textbook* has 'plug-n-play* generic how-to New Age Goddess rituals? Wouldn't an anthro textbook have accounts written by observers in the field of how women/men in the Wherever tribe honored their ancestors and protective gods, *not* 'priestess says...' stuff?
And why does such an educated woman talk like a teenaged girl swooning over Justin Beiber?

I may not be military, but even I know that people who aren't particularly enchanted with their service don't shuck off their *uniforms* at the end of the day and drop them on the floor like they're cheap off the rack corp wear. And just because she's not a combatant doesn't mean she should be a total incompetent at stuff even a teenaged girl could do to defend herself in a cat fight behind the gym.

Don't even get me started on the high school level of idiocy aboard the cargo plane.

I've heard such good things about this author. I really hope this was a (pardon the pun) fluke. This *thing* is going to the used bookstore, with my apologies.

I had to stop reading this after I spend way too many pages reading about her talking outloud to HERSELF while alone in her house, that should be read as a thought process, not spoken aloud. I also thought it was completely unblievable that she joined the Air Froce even though she is terrified of flying. Who does that? She didn't come off as a real human and I couldn't believe any of it. I don't think I even made it through the first chapter because it was so terrible. I cant believe i spent 12.99 on this book.